Electronic program guides (EPGs) enable TV viewers to navigate through an onscreen program guide and locate shows. With the guides, viewers can look at schedules of current and future programming, set reminders for upcoming programs, or enter instructions to record one or more shows.
Program data for an EPG is stored in the client memory. The amount of program data available for the EPG is dependent upon the resource environment at the client. In a low-resource environment, meaning the client has limited memory and/or processing resources, the amount of memory reserved for program data is limited. Making this situation more difficult is that every time a free memory call is made, the limited amount of memory is fragmented. This fragmentation effectively uses up memory space unless a de-fragmentation or garbage collection process is run. In the low-resource environment, however, such memory management techniques are too resource expensive to be viable options.
Accordingly, for such low-resource environments, there is a need to improve the way program data is stored and accessed at the client.